33 Places to Find Free Images Online

It’s a good topic and you’ve finally perfected it. Time to celebrate, right? Not so fast. You still have to format it and find at least one image related to your article.

You do a quick Google image search and find exactly what you’re looking for. You download it and drop it into WordPress. The whole process takes 60 seconds.

Sound about right?

How does a $4000 fine sound?

Even if you’re careful and you always check the copyright, you can still get nailed for infringement. Even if your blog doesn’t make money. Even if you link to the image author. Even if you don’t have any readers. Even if you take it down.

What You Need to Know About Image Copyright

Especially on the Internet. While the Internet is a global community, different countries still have different laws when it comes to copyright.

Rules around image use may change from place to place but the it’s important to understand what the terms mean.

1. Fair Use

Fair use is an exception to copyright law that allows for the use or partial use of copyright material. Under certain circumstances, material can be quoted verbatim for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research, without the need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder. For example, if you’re writing a book review, you can go ahead and use an official image of the book without fear of reproach. For more information about fair use (and how defend a claim), I highly recommend this article from Moz.

2. Public Domain

Public domain refers to the state of belonging or being available to the public as a whole, especially through not being subject to copyright or other legal restrictions. If something is in the public domain you can use it at your leisure. Work gets into the public domain when the intellectual property rights have expired, been forfeited, or just don’t apply. Many images go directly to the public domain, such as those from NASA and other government organizations, while others are donated by the author. Public domain works can be modified. It’s not required, but it’s good idea to indicate that image you’re using is from the public domain.

3. Creative Commons

The Creative Commons copyright licenses and tools are designed to find a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. They provide a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to creative work for anyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions . This creates a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law. There are a variety of creative commons licenses. You’ll need to know which licence the photo has been tagged with to know how to use it. Some will require attribution, others won’t. Some will allow you to modify the image, others won’t.

4. Royalty-Free

Royalty-free, refers to the right to use copyrighted material or intellectual property without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use. This does not mean it is free! It simply means once a permission has been granted you will not have to pay again. However you may still have to pay the first time. Most stock image websites are royalty-free because after you’ve paid for the image, you may use it as many times as you want in as many places as your want.

The easiest way to avoid complication is the buy an image outright and abide by the licence. But images can be expensive. Especially when you’re just starting out.

Where to Get Free Images Online

Fortunately, there are a ton of places to find free images online. These images can be used legally, without you having to pay for them. Just make sure you check to the licence and follow the rules. Some may not be modified, others will require attribution, etc.

Image Databases

Getty ImagesGetty images started out as a paid image database, which currently holds millions of images. They recently dropped their watermark on most of their collection in a program they’ calling an open-embed program. Users may now use images on their website free of charge as long as they use the provided embed code which creates a link back to Getty Images.

Perfect For: High Quality Stock PhotographyRestrictions: Must Use the Open-Embed Program.

FreeDigitalPhotos
Download free and premium stock photos and illustrations for websites, advertising materials, newspapers, magazines, ebooks, book covers and pages, music artwork, software applications and much more. All free images are high quality, produced by their community of professional stock photographers and digital illustrators. Free photos and illustrations are ideal for business, personal and educational use. Every image is free, with an option to buy larger images.

Perfect For: Small ImagesRestrictions: Attribution Required

stock.xchng
SXC was launched in February 2001 as an alternative for expensive stock photography. The idea was to create a site where creative people could exchange their photos for inspiration or work. The site has evolved into the massive community you see today — there are over 2,500,000 registered users and around 400,000 photos online.

freerange
Freerange Stock was formed with the goal to provide quality stock photos for commercial and non-commercial use. For free. They feel that free stock photos can be good photos. Freerange is an advertising revenue supported photographic community—photographers get paid when users click on the ads that appear next to their submissions. Images on the site are either shot by Freerange Stock, drawn from Freerange archives, or contributed by a talented community of photographers. They feel that the images want to be seen and good photos should be available to everyone—so they give the collections away with the hope that they will be useful and be enjoyed.

UnprofoundUnprofound has grown into a global collaboration of photographers. A small group of people take photos for the site and others are invited to join in, including you. Hopefully, it will grow into a useful resource for designers everywhere. It is 100% non-profit, and there are no ads—but if you like what they’re doing and feel the need to donate for server/bandwidth costs, there’s a button at the bottom of the page.

Perfect For: Commercial UseRestrictions: None

BigFoto.com
Most of bigfoto pictures have been contributed by amateur photographers who want nothing more than to see their images on the Internet. They are happy for you to use their work on your own website, as wallpaper on your computer desktop, or to print off and hang on your wall! You can even use the photos free of charge for commercial purposes.

FreeDigitalPhotos.netFreeDigitalPhotos.net offers you a unique way to download photos and illustrations. All the images on their website are available free of charge, for business, personal, charitable or educational use. These free images are small sized, but perfect for websites or draft printed work. If you need a larger sized version then they are all available to buy.

OpenphotoOpenPhoto is a niche photo sharing platform created in 1998. Their primary audience are artists, developers, teachers and students. OpenPhoto contributors offer their images for free under terms of Creative Commons licensing.

Perfect For: Artistic ImagesRestrictions: Varies. Check Image

Foter
Foter.com allows you to search, manage and add free stock photos to blogs, forums, websites and other online media. They host over 190 million free Creative Commons images from many online sources and the entire system is also available as a WordPress plugin for seamless use within the WordPress platform. Searching for photos and inserting them into blog posts or articles is designed to be very fast and convenient. Just search for images by keywords and grab the embed code to insert them into your blog. The embed code contains all necessary CC attribution, that are mandatory to include, so you don’t need to attribute authors manually.

Perfect For: Searching In WordPressRestrictions: Attribution Required

EduPic
Edupic Graphical Resource is a teacher designed free image resource for educators and their students. All images contained within are free for use by educational professionals and the students they serve without permission. All other use is by permission only.

Perfect For: Educational UseRestrictions: For Education Purposes Only

Wikepedia: Public Domain Image ResourcesPublic domain image resources is a copy of the master wikipedia page, which lists a number of sources of public domain images on the web. The presence of a resource on this list does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are in the public domain. You are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images before you submit them to Wikipedia.

Perfect For: Iconic PhotographsRestrictions: Varies. Check Image

UVic’s Language Teaching Clipart Library
This library consists of about 3000 images which they hope will be useful in the teaching of basic vocabulary in a variety of languages. The characters and objects depicted are as culturally neutral as possible. This is not a huge resource of graphics; its purpose is to provide a set of those graphics most basic and useful for low-level language-teaching, and at the same time, to make them as easily searchable as possible.

Perfect For: Object ClipArtRestrictions: None

Pics4Learning
Pics4Learning is a safe, free image library for education. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos & images for classrooms, multimedia projects, websites, videos, portfolios, or any projects in an educational setting.

Perfect For: Educational UseRestrictions: For Education Purposes Only

Openclipart
As of 2013 the Openclipart displays the works of over 3,000 artists who have contributed over 40,000 scalable vector graphics. The entire collection is available for free to download. All images are dedicated to the public domain by their contributors and are stored in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, often with thumbnails in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.

Perfect For: VectorsRestrictions: None

Pixabay
On Pixabay you may find and share images free of copyrights. All pictures are published under Creative Commonds public domain deed.

Perfect For: High Quality ImagesRestrictions: None

ImagebaseImagebase.net is a collection of photos, mostly taken by David Niblack, that can be freely used for personal, commercial, non-profit, artistic, or creative purposes.

Perfect For: Amateur PhotographyRestrictions: None

FreeFoto.com
FreeFoto.com is made up of 132549 images with 183 sections organized into 3640 categories. FreeFoto.com is the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet.

Gallery of free images and pictures for commercial use. All photos are available absolutely free, in high resolution and without registration. You can use them in your blog, on your website, for advertising, as a wallpaper, etc.

Perfect For: Commercial UseRestrictions: None

Rgbstock.comRgbstock.com is created by a group of enthusiastic photographers and graphic artists. Their vision is to build the best free stock image site on the web. They make high quality images available to those who cannot afford to pay for them.

Perfect For: Non-Commercial UseRestrictions: Permission Required

Image Search Engines

Just Google’s regular search, Google’s Advanced Image Search makes it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. There are a number of options to refine your image search, but the one you’ll want to pay attention to is the usage rights at the bottom. This will help you find images you can legally use for free.

Compfight
Compfight is an image search engine tailored to efficiently locate images for blogs, comps, inspiration, and research. They make good use of the flickr API, but aren’t affiliated with flickr.

Icon Finder
Iconfinder provides high quality icons for web designers and developers in an easy and efficient way. The site launched in 2007 as the first search engine focused on icons.

flickrCCflickrCC helps bloggers easily find photos on flickr that were released under the creative commons license.

FlickrStormFlickrStorm is a better search for Flickr. It works by looking for more than what you enter to find related and more relevant images.

VeezleUse Veezzle to find free stock photos quickly and easily. The search engine displays the most relevant and absolutely free stock photos from a variety of respected sources.

everystockphoto
Everystockphoto.com is a license-specific photo search engine. Currently they index and search millions of freely licensed photos, from many sources, and present them in an integrated search.

Sprixi
Sprixi arrange images into topics and order images by usefulness. Sprixi sources images from quality sites around the web and brings them together. Images on Sprixi generally have liberal licences such as Creative Commons or are in the public domain. You can choose from multiple sizes with one click. It;s simple to download or link to the image. Sprixi can even generate HTML code for your blog.

Excellent resource, Casandra! I spend entirely way too much time searching for the “perfect” image. Then I try and add to it with my lack of photoshop skills. I’ve spent/wasted hours looking for that perfect images for some blog post.